In the 1950s, the Eurocentric Morgans largely limited foreign lending to England and France. But with its core lending business eroded in the Casino Age, it suddenly emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as an “MBA bank”—so-called after the first initials of the three largest Latin American debtors: it made $1.2 billion in loans to Mexico, $1.8 billion to Brazil, and $750 million to Argentina. For Wall Street’s most conservative bank to have its largest foreign stake in Brazil showed its reliance on progressively riskier loans for profitability.
